


Of Scars and of Wounds in the Heart

by Dira Sudis (dsudis)



Category: Green Men Series - K. J. Charles
Genre: Arcane War Trauma, Cuddling & Snuggling, Established Relationship, Jewish Character, M/M, Post-World War I, Tentacle Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:14:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28185942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dsudis/pseuds/Dira%20Sudis
Summary: Max is in a state, and Barney helps him through it.
Relationships: Hugh Barnaby/Max Isaacs
Comments: 24
Kudos: 85
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Of Scars and of Wounds in the Heart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jain/gifts).



> Many thanks to Dancinbutterfly and Go Seaward for their help with this!

It wasn't anything like as clean as _waking up_. For one thing, generally waking up meant the bloody nightmare was over. 

Max rose to the surface of awareness, of _being Max_ , through a mucky stew of rage and horror and the vile glorious _fun_ of letting loose. He wasn't entirely on the loose anymore, by then--it was Barney who brought him back, of course, in the simplest way they'd found. Barney let himself undergo the same transformation Max had, letting his arms extend into their impossibly many-jointed form, dark and smooth and hard as a beetle's wings. Max's tentacles couldn't resist tangling around him, taste-feeling the iridescence his eyes could barely make out, and then that was Max mostly immobilized.

It was a bit trickier when it went the other way around; Barney's rigid beetle-legs didn't wrap around Max the same way, though Barney seemed equally irresistibly drawn when he was out of control. Instead, Barney's first move was generally to pin Max to the nearest surface, joint by joint holding more of him down. 

Max had to choose his spot very carefully, when he waded in after Barney.

But this time it was Max who'd gone off his head, Max who was just barely enough _himself_ now to recognize what was happening as Barney gave him a bloody-mouthed feral grin and kept fighting just enough to make Max keep trying to hold him. If they'd been nice peace-loving lads, that would be about the time that Max would remember that he didn't want to hurt Barney and start trying to pull himself under control--but if there had been any nice peace-loving lads in Experiment Station Seven to start with, they hadn't come back out alive. Max and Barney, chalk and cheese though they were, matched right up on this--they loved a good fight.

And this, unlike so many they'd been in, _was_ a good fight, evenly matched and only a little bloody and plaster-dusty from colliding with walls. There was no real muck here, no freezing mud, no stray bits of dead bodies that just blended into the landscape after a while. No endless thunder of guns or sick miasma of arcane combat. No horrors. Just Barney and Max, half transformed and having a right dust-up. 

Tangled up like they were, they could still kick and bite, still try in other ways to grab and pin and hold. Barney was wearing his absurdly posh silky-soft pyjamas; Max gradually realized that he himself wasn't wearing anything. 

He realized it, in fact, right about the time that Barney knocked him flat onto a soft-ish surface that he recognized as his own bed. If you wanted to call it a bed; getting rid of everything that would either get broken or turned into an improvised weapon at moments like this meant it was a sort of nest of bedding on the floor. Max had slept in worse places for pretty well all of his life until he came to 166 Fetter Lane, so he couldn't complain.

He definitely wasn't going to complain when he had all his limbs wrapped around Barney, and he was coming down enough from the mad battle-rush of whatever nightmare he'd had to actually _feel_ all of Barney. 

There weren't words for the way things felt, to those impossible parts of himself--but nothing felt better to touch with them than Barney, and particularly the impossible bits of him. Max couldn't have explained to anyone how or why the sight and touch of those jackknifing limbs, their brutal strength, their sheer _strangeness_ that was also a bone-deep familiarity, was somehow more alluring to him than he'd ever found any part of a man he liked, before the war. To say nothing of the way they set off every inch of his tentacles, feeling not just smooth and hard but _shining_ in a way that shouldn't be something he felt, but was.

But then it wasn't like he'd want to tell anyone how any part of his body reacted to any part of Barney anyway, so that hardly mattered. Max was already wrong for wanting a man, any man, in most folk's eyes; the part where neither of them was properly human anymore was just coals to Newcastle.

That was all right, though. They were in Sam's house, haven for every kind of oddity, and behind a door locked on both sides. Here, now, with Barney over him and around him and tangled with him, Max didn't have to care what anyone else might think of this. He only had to respond to the pressure of Barney's touch, the gleam in Barney's eye that was sliding into a different kind of heat as they both stopped fighting.

Not fighting didn't mean moving against each other any less fiercely, or loosening their grips. It was just a change of direction, pressing together _here_ instead of pushing there. A little pushing and shoving got Barney's pyjama trousers off, his shirt torn open and mostly out of the way, and then they were skin-on-skin, their cocks finally meeting the way their transformed limbs had from the start of this. 

Max let out a rough grunt at the wash of pleasure through him, while Barney breathed an almost musical sigh. Max snorted at the contrast and kissed him roughly, letting his tentacles wander a bit, slower now, letting himself really feel all those uncanny sensations now that they were feeding the hardness of his cock and the swelling of pleasure. 

Barney felt more than good under his touch, felt _right_ in some way no one else ever did--and when Barney touched him the same way, almost rough but just careful enough not to really hurt, Max shuddered as he wouldn't have for any ordinary caress. It was more than just touch, it set off sparks of impossible sensation in his brain, the way that Barney glittered and tasted sour-hot-sweet to this uncanny touch.

Barney reached between them first, using the narrow end of one limb, where the joints got closer together, nearly enough to be delicate. Max still froze at that hard touch, curling around behind his hips and then in along his groin, warning him where Barney was going. Max panted, suddenly aware of how quiet the room was around them, as Barney curled around him, dark and hard, the angles of every joint standing out sharply as they flexed. 

If he thought about it, Max knew that the sight of this insect-like limb curling around his cock would have been horrifying, before the war and Experiment Station Seven permanently warped his standards for horrors. But now it was _Barney_ , a touch somehow more intimate than fingers or mouth or arse could ever be; that dark, hard surface was the most naked Barney could be, the most secret truth of him exposed here between them.

Max couldn't help but reach out in turn; he curled closer to graze his teeth along Barney's jaw as he unwound a tentacle enough to use it for something else. He didn't rush--Barney liked just holding him, pinning him by that one small grip in a way that a much harder pressure on every other joint of his body wouldn't. Max let himself caress Barney's skin, enjoying the softness that still lingered over most of his body, where a sheen of sweat made him glitter and hum in the perception of Max's transformed touch. 

When he finally reached between them, he twined his tentacle around Barney's limb where it gripped him, and encircled Barney's cock as well, holding them both together in his hot, rippling grip. Barney growled and bit Max's lip before he settled into a kiss, wet and breathless, wildness barely restrained.

Max kissed back fervently, sweet as he could manage at a moment like that, because he couldn't say, _Thank you for wanting to make love to the ugliest parts of me with the strangest parts of you. Thank you for being the same as me. Thank you for walking through a door when you know it's got me on the other side of it at my worst, and locking it up behind you._

It didn't need saying, even if he could ever find the words. It was here, between them, in every kiss and caress and half-voiced sound; they were what they were together. Barney was here because next time Max would be over in his room, with the door locked behind him on both sides. 

Of course, Barney was also here because Max was doing _that_ with his tentacle, flexing it just so, fucking gingerly into the channel it made, into Barney's hard hold around him, feeling Barney's cock throb in his own impossible grip. Barney was panting into his mouth, his grip on Max going a little more rigid, scraping against his skin. It wasn't long after that until Barney was tipping his head back, mouth open on a silent cry as he spent between them.

Max stared, hungrily taking in every second of Barney's climax, and somehow it still took him by surprise when Barney shook it off and focused on him, easing his limb out from under Max's hold only to wrap it around Max's tentacle, where it was still coiled around both of their cocks. Barney squeezed then, using Max's tentacle like a glove to protect them both from his harder touch, holding his tentacle itself in the way that made Max shiver and nearly sob with all the indescribable sensations of it. 

Barney's other limb curled around the back of his thigh and crept upward in hitching little movements. 

Barney wouldn't actually try to push into him, not like this, but the sheer thought of Barney being inside him that way was enough to make Max jerk against his hold, arching into Barney as he spent. The rush of it was like surfacing out of the nightmare all over again, a flash of rightness that left him securely placed in his own body, tangled together with Barney's. 

Max blinked down at his hands as they reformed, quickly but not so instantly that he couldn't see it happening--and then there they were, the same as ever, with the same ragged nails and scarred knuckles. Barney, too, faded to his usual peach-pink softness, all those impossible joints reducing down to the usual number of fingers with the usual number of knuckles. Max flexed his hands, touched his fingertips to each other, taking it in all over again. He was himself again, as if nothing had ever happened--not locked in his half-transformation, not sliding inexorably toward the full monstrous form he hadn't taken since they'd demobbed.

He flopped onto his back, disentangling at last from Barney. He looked down at himself, past the wonder of hands and wrists and arms of an ordinary length, to see what he'd already felt: his old familiar body, all in one piece. If he was sweaty and smeared with a bit of this and that, he was still cleaner than he'd been on any given day of the war. 

Max let his eyes fall shut again as he murmured the Modeh Ani--he was, after all, still in bed after waking--and he let himself feel all the sincerity of _You have returned within me my soul with compassion_. It had been a rote thing he said, when he was a kid, but it had taken new meaning every time he woke up alive on the Front--and new meaning again, in Experiment Station Seven, and again every day he woke up out of it. Every day he found his soul returned to a body he could recognize; every time he found that he was still human enough to be going on with for another day.

Barney, as he generally did, lay quietly beside Max until he'd finished the blessing, and then slung a leg over Max's and sprawled comfortably over him. That was all right; it was early yet, and as far as Max knew, he and Barney had nowhere in particular to be today. Sam would've heard enough from downstairs that he'd wait until they emerged on their own, unless something particularly dire came up, though he might come up and undo the outside lock on the door if he wanted to encourage them.

"Lucky, isn't it?" Barney murmured drowsily, his breath warm against Max's chest. "That the two of us who made it through were bent the same way."

Max snorted at the idea of calling any of this _lucky_ , though he wouldn't say it couldn't have been worse; he thanked Hashem daily that it hadn't been. What Barney had said called to mind something he'd been thinking while they were in the midst of it, though--the thought that they'd already been abnormal even before they were made into _this_.

"Dunno if it's luck, really," Max said, feeling his way through the idea as he wouldn't have allowed himself to, if he were speaking to anyone else. 

Barney made a mildly curious little sound, about what Max had expected; he never got offended when Max dared to have ideas about things. He seemed to regard thinking more as a dirty chore he was happy to hand off to the nearest enlisted man, rather than an officer-and-gentleman's prerogative Max might trespass on. 

"D'you remember," Max said, and then _he_ remembered, and wished he hadn't. "When the others--I didn't see all of them, but sometimes, when they failed." It didn't seem right to say just that they'd _died_ , especially since most of them had been helped along to their deaths, when it became obvious that they'd... failed.

Barney shivered against him. "Not the sort of thing one forgets, no."

"Sometimes it was... like they were fighting themselves," Max went on, clinging to the thought instead of falling into those memories. "Not just figuring out how to control it and losing control--we both had enough trouble with that. But trying not to _be_ it, like they couldn't remember that the enemy was out there somewhere, and not in them."

Barney didn't make a sound, but Max could feel the listening awareness in the set of his body against Max's. No danger of him drifting off to sleep now. 

"I think maybe... maybe that's why we made it," Max said. "Because we'd already been queer our whole lives. We'd already made our own peace with having something in us that anyone else would be horrified by. And we both--" Max huffed softly, almost a laugh. "Not the same road to get there, but we both were stubborn enough buggers to stare it down and say, _This is what I am, and if you don't like it you can..._ I dunno, whatever a posh bugger like you would do, if someone tried to kick up a fuss over you doing anything you liked." 

Barney, even stripped down to nothing in Experiment Station Seven, had always worn his background like a velvet cloak. Naked and bleeding and sicking up on the floor, you could still see that he came from the kind of money and privilege that left him utterly assured of his own place in the world. Even if that place were, unaccountably and temporarily, the arcane cesspit of the War Beneath the War.

"And as for me," Max went on. "Well. Being Jewish, I come from about three hundred generations of folk too stubborn to quit being what they are just because everyone around them thinks they ought to be different. Almost the whole point of us, really."

Barney made a startled little sound and picked his head up. "Oh," he said, "You're--" and then he looked down to Max's cock, lying limp against his thigh and very visibly not the same as Barney's. "Is _that_ what a circumcision looks like?"

Max blinked at him, too used to Barney being Barney to quite disbelieve it, and still... "You've been pretty well acquainted with my cock for three years now, and you never figured that out?"

"Well," Barney said, resting his head on Max's shoulder again, as comfortable with him as ever and making quick work of the split-second's fear that _this_ would be the thing about him that Barney couldn't put up with, when he'd figured Barney already knew and didn't care. He gave Max's cock a consoling little pat that startled Max into a relieved laugh. "It might have been anything, considering where we met. I didn't like to ask."

Max shook his head. "But you--you've heard me _pray_ , mate. _In Hebrew_." Two minutes ago, and also pretty well every day since they'd met. Even in Experiment Station Seven, even when he couldn't string together an entire blessing, Max had managed a _Barukh Hashem_ or _Barukh ata Adonai Eloheinu_ at the moments that seemed to call for it. He'd heard Barney mumbling his own goyishe prayers from time to time, enough to know that he said them in English, so he'd known Barney wasn't Catholic. 

"Is that what that is?" Barney said, around a yawn. "I'm terrible at languages, you know."

Max sighed and slung an arm around him. "Well. Good thing you've got me, then."

"Yes," Barney murmured. "That's rather what I was trying to say, darling--not so much why it was the two of us who survived, as... I'm glad you did, since I did. Lucky we're here together, after all of it."

"Ah," Max said, and held him a little tighter, letting Barney feel in his grip that Max was just as glad. "Right, then. Can't argue with that."


End file.
